1/3 Finally a professional journalistic investigation into Origin's past& current state of political affairs. Kudos &thanks to AP reporters Dale Kang & Maria Cheng for really great &sorely needed work.
@mylcheng
apnews.com/article/china-… 2/3 Key bit of new info from the new report: a previously undisclosed inspection of the Huanan Market was conducted by authorities on 25Dec'19, nearly a week earlier than the inspections the WHO had been told about. Perhaps sampling of the live animals occurred then, but w/held.

1/8 Since I was a kid I looked up to scientists as the good guys, heroes even. Eventually they became my colleagues. Skillfully, painstakingly, sometimes even bravely pursuing a deeper truer understanding of how things worked &came about in our world in a way that improved it. 2/8 But it took the C19 origin controversy to burst my bubble about the selfless public-spirited mission of science.

Rasmussen's 14 Samples:

1. No proper proximal origin investigation was ever conducted. She's talking about processing data on her laptop in Canada. 2. LL & Anti-Vax are part of the same conspiratorial movement filled w grifters.

Here's the other preprint, it's now a "likely" but not "dispositive" Science double feature...
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… This is the much more interesting work of science and will take longer to digest the final paper, it might possibly increase weight I give to the zoo argument. Please feel free to dissuade me as I grapple w it.

Spanked hard by reviewers for a ridiculously worded preprint shamelessly promoted to the media.. revised heavily throughout, warnings of its significant limitations inserted, stripped clean of all original outrageous claims).. &Science STILL publishes it!
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc… No wonder the zoo crew went quiet and @PhilippMarkolin suddenly found humility... this is a poor excuse for a Science paper!

Who in the US might have answers to lingering questions about a possible lab origin? For starters, these DEFUSE team members. But why arent we hearing from these& other scientists &why is major media nowhere 2b found on this?
Dr. Baric, UNC
Dr. Rocke, USGS/NWHC
Dr. Unidad, PARC Do we not hear from those w detailed knowledge because there's no there there or because it'd open a big can of worms? And what are we to think other than it feels suspicious that no one's talking openly and no one's sticking microphones in faces either.

What I didn't understand when I joined Twitter in Aug'21 was why I was being labeled an anti-Asian anti-science rightwing conspiracy theorist when I was a well educated and trained 30 yr career biomedical scientist. 1/12 All I was saying (&writing) was that I thought a lab-related accident was a totally rational scientifically sound hypothesis and s/b investigated immediately alongside a natural zoonosis.

I'd remembered reading about the Hubei Wildlife Rescue Centre on the east side of Wuhan but what I'd forgotten is its close (and, of course, secretive) affiliation with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Extraordinary work by @mstandaert.
aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/27… "The rescue centre, in a hilly area in the Hongshan district, is next door to a private zoo, Jiufeng Forest Zoo, which was shut the day before Wuhan was locked down in January 2020 to prevent the spread of the coronavirus."

Now watch the zoo crew again get on its hi horse &accuse Ebright& Chan of implicating virologists as responsible for (murdering) 20M people or inciting violence& death threats. This might be the most insidious among their arsenal of bad faith arguments. &Afaik entirely baseless.

https://twitter.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1540824108849631234

Takeaways from Harrison& Sachs PNAS '22:
1- Yrs ago EHA-WIV-UNC est a SARSr work program admin by the US Gov. A lead agency, the NIH, must be compelled to disclose this program via cooperation w a science-based bipartisan inquiry w full investgatve powers. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn… 1 cont'd- As it is, the NIH, EHA, UNC, USAID & others involved have inexplicably chosen a disturbing path of absolute secrecy or stubborn resistance to disclosure re: info& data known to be in their possession resulting in great loss of public trust &credibility.

Re: China's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin’s amazing comments at the Regular Press Conference on June 22, 2022.
fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_6… Wenbin comment1- The so-called “lab leak” is a lie created by forces against China. It is politically motivated and has no scientific basis."

2.5 yrs after the fact, LLH is entirely compatible with the current available body of origin evidence. What we hear from the zoo crew is one-sided propaganda-like bias, not gray reality or actual science. All one has to do is to read the SAGO report. 1/4
who.int/publications/m… SAGO Fact 1- Based on current evidence the source of SARS2, its introduction into the market and the site of 1st human infection are altogether unknown. 2/4

These 2 studies tend to fly under the radar in the disc I see on Twitter. They both hunt extensively thruout China for SARS2-r virus, in game animals, at the Huanan seafood market& regions inhabiting bats known to host Sarbecos. 1/9
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
europepmc.org/article/ppr/pp… The congregate results were that after sampling 1,941 mammalian game animals, 102 samples from Huanan market, and 13,064 bats across 14 provinces of China, amazingly, not a single SARS2r virus was found. 2/9

Pg54 WHO Reprt: "An explosive outbreak began in Wuhan in early Dec2019. Only more severe cases w
contact w the healthcare system were recognized. Other milder (& asymptomatic) cases
will have been occurring at the same time as the recognized cases but no info is.. available The retrospective search for cases compatible w COVID-19 illness identified 76,253
episodes w 1 of 4 indicator conditions... The clinical assessment of the 76 253 individuals revealed 92 cases clinically
compatible with COVID-19.

Yesterday I happened across a Google News headline that stunned me (below). &I wondered what nutty scientist could’ve possibly proposed such a crackpot idea in early 2020 when a deadly virus new &unknown was spreading like wildfire across the globe? 1/25 It read, "BSL-2 labs should be allowed to handle the novel coronavirus” because “a trip to the grocery store now poses a much greater risk” than SARS2 in a BSL-2 lab. Warning: this got me thinking& writing at length about this and the SARS2 origin matter.

Younger scientists today feeling called as interpreters of science for the public good, w new unprecedented access to vast audiences online, have been learning how to conform their own scientific training to that of the media's in order to become co-inflencers of public opinion. An example seen in the latest "battle of the preprints" between the Chinese CDC and a collaborative cluster of Western virologists& scientists. The CCDC finding of "significant correlation" with all virus found at the Market as originating not from animal but from humuan sources.

Everybody on Twitter thinks theyve important things to say, I've a small footprint of ~400 followers but this might be the most important Tweet I’ve made since joining in Aug21. What's happening to Science's reputation is appalling& as an institution will take decades to recover. I love science& my work in it. Served on my share of review panels (50?)& reviewed 100s of grant proposals& manuscripts. Never have I seen anything like this before. Disturbing times w extraordinary occurrences never allowed previously that I can recall in my 30 yr career.

Yay, poke fun and emphasize only what serves your "side". And if you think leak is still plausible, you're the kooky anti-scientist..?
But what's actually substantive here?
researchsquare.com/article/rs-137…

https://twitter.com/stuartjdneil/status/1499664646642487296

(1) SARS2+ found all over Market mainly on the ground& sewage wells, also west-side stalls, bags, fences, even a "feather removal machine" (2) this data published by the Chinese CDC 2 yrs after sampling in Jan'20 (3) 1 LinA positive sample found on a glove 1/1/20, the rest LinB.